Thoughts on Learning 2.0

This is has been a very worthwhile exercise. As LCPL moves forward, the skills staff have learned through the 22 things should prove useful. Maybe none of the things directly apply to someone's job, but the impact of the web upon our lives will continue to grow. The 22 things are just the tip of the iceberg. Hopefully, some folks will be motivated to explore other new technologies that are emerging.

We are beginning a complete rebuild of the LCPL webpage, and will be incorporating 2.0 functionality whenever possible (and justified). Many things that we have looked at with Flickr, blogs, rss, and podcasts are things that we can incorporate.

NetLibrary

I've been using this since we began offering it as a service. I really like the audiobook portion. The ability to download audiobooks has been really well received by patrons. I do think NetLibrary can learn from OverDrive. OverDrive's checkout and download process is much more streamlined. I talk to more patrons about problems with NetLibrary than I do OverDrive.

Podcasts

Two of my favorites are Ask the Techies and Tech Tuesday (Kojo Nnamdi Show). A good tool to access podcasts, is Juice.

YouTube and Library Promotion

Something that we will probably see more and more of in the future. YouTube could be a very useful tool to market services and create instructional (i.e. how to) videos.

You probably had to be there...

Now for something completely different. Let's pause a minute to pay homage to the Major. In my opinion, the best scrambling qb ever in college football. Period. Of course, I may be a little biased. Oh yeah, Pat White aint too bad either.

Making Javascript Suck Less

That's MochiKit. This made the honorable mention list for the Web 2.0 awards. It's a pretty cool Javascript library with a lot of functionality built in that I can hopefully harness. Right now I'm using it to develop sortable lists for the New Titles web page(s). Just need to get it to play well with my xsl.

Very Happy to see Meebo came out tops for the Communication Award. It rocks. Made it possible to dump QuestionPoint. Thank you. Thank you.

Zoho

It works quite well. I can see where it would be quite useful for someone that uses many different pcs (people who use our internet stations would be a prime example). All you have to do is login to Zoho and your stuff is right there. This is a dandy for convenience. One caveat, you need to be comfortable with the fact that your data is stored on a server somewhere instead of your home computer. As with all apps, read the privacy statement closely and decide if you can live with it. Of course if you use Gmail, Hotmail, etc... your fanny is already flapping in the wind.